Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

Lately, God has asked me to do a lot of kooky things. But, knowing me as well as He does, He usually filters them through my friend Dorothy, from whom I'll believe anything. D and I are in ministry together. We're a team, though we have no official designation. I'm the Elisha to her Elijah. If I have a title, it would have to be Dorothy's Right Arm. God gives her these wonderful mind-blowing ideas for cutting edge, experiential worship. She's the forest thinker. I, for some reason known only to God, have the ability to help her flesh these ideas out into the nuts and bolts needed to actually get it done. I'm the tree thinker, I'm good with details.

This week, my assignment is boxes - specifically, wrapping a bunch of empty boxes to use as fake "presents" for our upcoming Christmas drama set. Sometimes, it's a good thing to be a saver - I happened to have enough boxes lying around my house and didn't have to go out box hunting (similar to fox hunting, without the gun). See, God knows if He said, "this week I really need you to go forth and wrap some boxes" I would say, "Excuse me? What?"

In the year or so that D and I have served together in ministry at our current church I have found myself doing the following:

1. Making a life size mirror frame and being a mime "reflection" on stage.
2. Making a giant heart out of red cloth and pool noodles.
3. Spent an afternoon researching scent diffusers (and doing lots of "sniff" tests to weed out obnoxious or allergy provoking scents.)
4. Carting around big pieces of cardboard for our cardboard testimony service.
5. Measuring giant lengths of cloth using D's garage floor marked off as a measure and then cataloguing and wrapping them onto bolts.
6. Teetering precariously from the top of a 15 ft. ladder pinning various sorts of cloth all around the stage area.
7. Carrying all sorts of miscellaneous set design accoutrements in my purse and pockets - safety pins, tape, gaffers clips.
8. Spent an afternoon discussing the logistics of making bread in a bread machine and how to time it for communion.
9. Spent countless hours researching such things as stage light gels, stage flat foam, and flannel board figures.
10. Created a giant life-size flannel board for Easter service.

I'm sure I've forgotten some, but those are the most memorable ones that spring to mind. It's funny and amazing how God has found me a niche that only I can fill. I've always been a Jill-of-all-trades (or, as I like to put it, a Renaissance woman). Like my dad, I know a little bit about a lot of stuff, and I'm good at researching what I don't know. I'm not an artist, per se, but I have enough creative/artistic ability to manage in many different areas. I can draw some, paint some, sew some, craft some, fix some. I have a working knowledge of carpentry and have learned how to jeri-rig most anything (from the Fix It Master, my husband). And what I don't know how to do I can learn pretty quickly.

Who but God would have designed this crazy ministry position for me? We have an actual group; we call ourselves the pPod (because many of us are a "P" on the Myers-Briggs) but really my ministry is to be Dorothy's assistant/right arm/tree detail person/researcher. I'm sort of an adjunct part of the creative team, but not exactly.

I don't even really know what I'm doing. I'm making it up as I go along. But since Dorothy says she is too, I guess that's okay. I worry sometimes that what I'm doing is not significant (in the big picture). I mean, I'm not helping orphans in Russia or treating AIDS patients in Africa. But as I was driving along praying about this God whispered in my ear that perhaps I might encourage or open the door for God to speak to those who will. Hmmm. Food for thought.

In the meantime, I have some boxes to wrap.